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The Brothers Karamazov
Maybe this reading I can learn the point of young Kolya.
“And yet he is first in Latin himself,” cried one of the boys.
...
Kolya apparently has picked all this up from the always annoying Rakitin, but he reminds me more of Pavel. I think he must represent the younger, nihilist influenced generation for Dostoyevsky. That last bit about him excelling at Latin yet attacking the teaching of the Classical languages, reminds me of Michel Foucault. Foucault was very much the man of the future Dostoyevsky was afraid of. (Yet he could have gone mano a mano with Father Ferapont when it comes to self-mortification. That actually sounds like a fun idea.)
The way my books, or in this case stories, keep relating to each other -- something like snakes biting each other’s tails -- is becoming exhausting. (He states, not really complaining.) “Teddy” by J.D. Salinger turns out to be a wonderfully brief exposition of The Perennial Philosophy. But this is (as it often is) a male version of that philosophy where the goal is to transcend and get off the damn wheel. But if everything, including us, is God. And if We’ve gone to such trouble to dream/Create this reality, why are we so keen to leave the audience?
There are times when I like to step back from an artistic experience and view it from the perspective of the creators (author or actors -- TV shows, especially after a couple or more seasons, like to re-juggle the parts so that the actors have something new to do. These re-jugglings are not always popular with the fans, but I try to view them from the perspective of the actors going stale (insane) from playing the same part for so long. Some examples: the Buffybot; Dark Willow; Dark Piper; about every other season of Eureka.) And yet any theatrical experience (defined as generously as possible) is best experienced from the seats. Transcending “reality” or “Maya” means leaving the seats behind for something more “profound.” Transcendence is fundamentally leaving the theater. How does this make sense when we’re the ones (One?) who created the theater and the play? You could even argue that it is counterproductive making people aware that they are only “actors” in a play.
How does this relate to The Brothers K.? The Perennial Philosophy and Dostoyevsky’s crisis of Christianity -- that everything is permitted -- are connected by a particularly loathsome (from the perspective of the naive Christian -- dovetail joint. If everything is God then where is the evil? But if there is no evil, what is all this phenomena that we apprehend as evil? It’s all enough to make you want to wear weighted chains and a hair shirt.
p640 [Kolya, talking with Alyosha, claims he is “an incurable Socialist”]
“A Socialist?” laughed Alyosha. “When have you had time to become one? Why, I thought you were only thirteen?”
Kolya winced.
“In the first place I am not thirteen, but fourteen, fourteen in two weeks.” He flushed angrily. “And in the second place I don’t understand what my age has to do with it. The question is what are my convictions not what is my age, isn’t it?”
I’m wondering if I was as much of an ass at this age. This is when I went through my Marxist phase while reading The Communist Manifesto and when I refused to be confirmed in the Lutheran faith, after my parents hauled me around to anyone in the San Fernando Valley religious community who was supposed to be “good with youth.” By the time I finished high school I’d switched to utopian socialism (which is the closely related secular cousin of Dostoyevsky’s utopian Christianity. In fact they even overlap in places.)
Dostoyevsky makes Kolya seem a bit of a fool, manipulated by the even worse Rakitin, but Zossima was urging his flock of Fathers and monks to appeal to this very tendency of young people to be drawn to naive utopian dreams. Dostoyevsky seems to see Christian utopianism as more anchored in tradition and God, but from the perspective of the 21st century the two traditions seem equally bankrupt... though just as tempting as ever.
p642 [Alyosha] “...Not long ago I read a criticism, made by a German who had lived in Russia, of our students and school boys. ‘Show a Russian schoolboy,’ he writes, ‘a map of the stars, which he knows nothing about, and he will return the map next day with corrections on it.’ No knowledge and unbounded conceit -- that’s what the German meant to say about the Russian schoolboy.”
“Yes, that’s perfectly right.” Kolya laughed suddenly. “Exactly right! But this German did not see the good side, what do you think? Conceit maybe, that comes from youth and will be corrected if need be. But, on the other hand, there is an independent spirit almost from childhood, boldness of thought and conviction, and not the spirit of those sausage makers, groveling before authority. . . . But this German was right all the same. Hurray the German! But Germans need strangling all the same. Even though they are so good at science and learning they must be strangled.”
...
Well that’s interesting. Of course I note that he’s seconding my views of mid to late 19th century Germans as expressed in the section of this blog about Doctor Faustus. And there’s nothing really surprising about animosity between Germans and Russians. The 20th century would give them both ample opportunities for strangling each other.
This bit with Kolya is even more Russian than the rest.
After doing a little reading about Dosoyevsky's life, I now see in Kolya a good deal of the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky. And, there is a good deal of the somewhat older, but still very young Fyodor in Rakitin as well... I didn't see that coming.
Small Victories
"This Dog's Life"
It just occurred to me that religious people trying to make sense of life -- as part of God’s plan -- reads about the same as pre-Copernican astronomers trying to make sense of the movement of planets, you end up with really convoluted thinking. It’s like the flip side of the Argument From Design -- trying to find a purpose and intention in everything. We are good at seeing faces in things and in finding causes for the most perplexing effects. A child sleeping in her bed is hit by a stray bullet fired by someone who has no idea she even exists, but people still ask, “Why her?” God is sending us just as much cancer, or whatever, as we can stand to make us stronger and so that we will seize the day.
I tend to think of the Mount St. Helens eruption as a counter to this kind of thinking. If you were on the wrong side of that peak that day in 1980 you were simply dead, and for 57 people this was certainly true, but there are always the random exceptions. Here are some interesting stories I ran into. I especially like the first story, the one where people were saved by a combination of geography and a guy’s fondness for breakfast. At least no one is claiming that Jesus made them especially hungry that morning... while enthusiastically annihilating virtually every speck of life within miles of them.
p130 Having a good dog is the closest some of us are ever going to come to knowing the direct love of a mother or God, so it’s no wonder it knocked the stuffing out of me and Sam when Sadie died. I promised Sam we’d get another puppy someday, but secretly decided not to ever get another dog. I didn’t want to hurt that much again, if I could possibly avoid it. And I didn’t want my child’s heart and life to break like that again. But you don’t always get what you want; you get what you get. This is a real problem for me. You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace. And while theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay through the nose. And you can’t pay your child’s way.
...
p132 She [Sadie] lived with us for more than a decade, saw us through great joy and great loss. She consoled us through friends’ illnesses, the death of Sam’s grandparents. She and I walked Sam to school every day. She was mother, dad, psych nurse. She helped me survive my boyfriends and the tinny, hollow loneliness in between. She helped Sam survive his first mean girlfriend. She let my mother stroke her head forever. She taught comfort.
...
Just the other day a friend posted a photo of her dog (a chihuahua, no less) sitting in the passenger seat of her car. The text was “Dog is my copilot.” I am so much more comfortable with “Dog” instead of “God” in this role. If people wanted to attribute all the spiritual qualities they force on God to “Dog” instead, I would go along happily. If they tried it with cats I might balk, but there are even a few cats (Maru) who may have near divine qualities.
“God,” on the other hand, seems to me to be an ephemeral extrapolation and magnification of a dog’s good qualities into thin air. Into the cosmic ether. As a pantheist, I can’t totally reject this notion. But why can’t you imagine these qualities inside yourself instead?
In one of the stories I’ve skipped, Lamott made it very clear how she was personally devastated by the death of friends and of relationships to an extent that I can hardly imagine. In the past I’ve been pleasantly surprised to learn that I am not completely unfeeling, but losses just don’t affect me the way they do her. As a result, I really can’t judge what she finds necessary, given her heightened sensitivity to loss. Of course dogmatic religions don’t tend to give individuals freedom to believe or not based on their personalities. And I suppose I should make clear that I'm not using "dogmatic" in any special way here.
Jump to Next: TBK. Bk XI. 3.
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